Since discovering the Great War channel in 2022 and binge watching all of Indy & Co. research the last few months to include Between Two Wars and now finally WW2 I have listened with great interest to the various authors that you quote in your research, but one name I have never seen mentioned is the author John Toland. I discovered Toland in the late 80’s while working on my BA in History and at the time really enjoyed reading his works, especially “The Rising Sun” (1970) which presented in some detail the political, cultural and social events that eventually led to the Japanese entry into WW2. What prompted me to write this topic was when I was watching the Across the Airwaves episode “FDR knew about Pearl Harbor.” In Toland’s work “Infamy: Pearl Harbor and it’s Aftermath” my takeaway from his research is that not only FDR knew, but pretty much actively conspired, almost a “nod and a wink” kind of scenario, that the attack on Pearl was imminent. After reading many other sources since then I agree with Indy’s analysis that in fact he did not know and this pretty much discredits Toland’s entire thesis for Infamy. I was wondering if anyone else had read Toland and if they had read Infamy specifically and what their takeaway was on it. His book on Korea, “In Mortal Combat” (1991) is still one of my favorite reads on Korean War History. So, any thoughts on Toland, Infamy or any of his other works and his style of research would be welcome. Thanks, Randy Forman.
I’m afraid I haven’t read any of Toland’s books, although I have copies of The Battle of the Bulge and The Last 100 Days stashed away somewhere to be read in the future.
From other sources, I’d gathered the notion that the actual attack on Pearl Harbour wasn’t known in advance to FDR or the military leadership, but that the drift toward open hostilities was understood and expected. What took all receiving parties by surprise was the audacious scope of the Japanese attacks and their run of fantastic good luck in accomplishing so many of their early objectives.
I don’t buy the idea that the US invited attack on the battleship fleet because almost all of the USN leadership still expected any possible US-Japanese war to come down to a Jutland-style slugging match … the people who point to the lucky escape of the Pacific Fleet carriers to some 4D Chess move by the Americans are suffering from the military version of post hoc ergo propter hoc … the USN turned the carriers into replacements for capital ships because they had no choice after December 7th, not because they’d decided in advance that carriers were the new primary striking weapon of the fleet.
It worked, but not because either IJN or USN leaders planned it that way: both sets of admirals still thought big gun ships would be decisive, but the USN had none left in hand, so did the best they could with CVs, CAs and CLs.
For the Korean War, my favourite is still Fehrenbach’s This Kind of War, but I admit I haven’t done a lot of reading on that conflict.